Game Engines

All of the lighting work that you do will probably be done either entirely within a game engine, or created in a 3D program like Maya, and exported to a game engine.

You don't really have any choice in the matter as to which engine you'll be working with, it depends entirely on the tools and workflow of the studio you end up working for. You may have a favorite engine that you've learned and worked with, only to discover once you start working somewhere that they use a completely different engine. You won't accomplish anything by complaining, so it's time to learn some new tools! This is especially true if the company uses proprietary tools, which you have probably never seen before.

Hopefully you enjoy learning new tools, and remember: flexibility is a good thing! The more you learn about how different game engines and methods work, the easier it will be the next time you need to adapt.

To give you an example, at the studios I've worked at, Westwood Studios had proprietary engines, and Insomniac did as well. Psyonix used Unreal, and Crytek of course used the CryEngine. 343 used proprietary tools for Halo, and Bend Studios used a heavily modified version of Unreal. And I've worked on freelance projects with Unity. So you really never know what you're going to work with.

Fortunately, there's a wealth of information on the internet in the form of videos and tutorials to help get you started if you haven't worked with a game engine before. At least, that's the case for publicly available engines. In-house proprietary engines aren't something you can learn in advance, but the more you've worked with the engines that are available, the easier it will be to transition to in-house tools.

At the time of this writing, the two most popular game engines are Unreal Engine and Unity.

These engines used to be relatively expensive, especially if you just wanted to get your hands on them to try them out.
Eventually, Unreal Engine became free to download and use, with a stipulation that if you make more than a certain amount in profits, you pay a percentage to Epic.

Unity quickly followed suit, so now anyone can download these engines and try them out.

Although these engines are probably the best known to those that are interested in game engine technology, there are a number of other engines in use today.

Here are a few of them:

CryEngine
Amazon Lumberyard
Frostbite

 

Looks like Amazon saved some money on their logo.

 

There are actually quite a few game engines out there, here's a list at Wikipedia.

To make things even more confusing, even if a studio is using the Unreal Engine or Unity, the odds are very good that they've modified it, sometimes heavily, so even if you've worked with a given engine, you'll probably still need to get up to speed with any changes they've made or methods they've adapted to their own needs.

Regardless of the engine you end up working with, it's the software you'll most likely use for all light creation, placement and adjustment in the game, for both level lighting and cinematics.

 

Next: Aesthetics vs. Performance